Over the past several days there has been a lot of "chatter" about College Football going to some variation of a 4 team playoff. This is both good and bad news for college football fans.
The good news is that college football is finally recognizing that the current bowl system sucks and sees the need for a playoff. The BCS was great in one aspect because it ensured a "national title game" but at the same time it relegated all other college football teams into a virtual NIT setting for them to finish out their seasons. Honestly what is the point of having the Las Vegas Bowl? To see what team can finish the season ranked 25th??
The bad news is that while college football is moving towards a playoff, the only playoff scenarios being talked about right now involved 4 teams. While any playoff is better than no playoff, a 4 team playoff is still lame. It is stupid to have only 4 teams in a playoff system because it ensures that no mid-major will ever get into the mix. If college football adopts a 4 team playoff system, it is saying to the 54 non-BCS schools "your seasons don't matter at all"
As a solutions oriented person, I figured it was my duty to come up with a college football playoff system that would best serve the interests of the game. There were four things that I felt such a system had to do in order to be acceptable: 1) Preserve the importance of the regular season 2) Give everyone team a chance 3) Crown a true champion 4) Reward teams who had excellent seasons
In my view the best way to achieve all three of these objectives is with a 24 team single elimination playoff, where all 11 conference champions earn automatic bids, and the top 8 teams get byes. There would be 13 at large bids.
This would be a 5 round tournament, with the first two rounds taking place at the higher seeded teams stadium and the last 3 rounds taking place at neutral sites.
Because teams could play up to 5 games in this tournament, I would only allow teams to play 11 regular season games (down from 12).
I would also scrap the BCS ranking system and instead create a committee similar to the one the NCAA Basketball tournament uses in order to seed the teams and to choose what at large teams make the field.
24 teams may seem like a lot, but with 5 of the bids going to mid-major conferences, a lot of top 25 teams will be left out. If this system was in place last year: Georgia, Oregon State, Nebraska, Penn State, and Hawaii all would have been left on the sideline.
Not only does this solution meet all 4 of my criteria, but how much fun would it be to watch meaningful games during December instead of seeing two 6-6 teams play in the Freedom Bowl.
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